Learning to read is a critical part of the educational process and an essential prerequisite for most aspects of modern life. A key part of the learning process is repeated practice with feedback, leading to increased confidence and skill. Unfortunately, children (and adult literacy students) do not have the opportunity to read aloud often enough and receive such feedback.
Speech recognition systems known in the art are designed to recognize user utterances in an audio signal and translate them into a textual representation. A grammar is used to determine the likelihood of particular word sequences, essentially allowing the recognizer to dismiss unlikely sequences in favor of more likely ones, based on the knowledge of the structure of the task being recognized. However, grammars known in the art fail to appreciate the unique needs of individuals learning to read and do not perform well in recognizing these individuals' utterances.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for using speech recognition systems to aid in reading practice, instruction, and assessment.